Rebecca Macijeski
Rebecca Macijeski is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University in Louisiana. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, and many others.
Autobiography
My brain is where my heart is.
It’s her turn to host for dinner
at a little table in the kitchen
at a big window overlooking the yard
where flashes between neurons
look just like migrating birds.
My brain and my heart are old friends.
They’ve kept touch over letters
and now they text each other, too.
Sometimes sloth memes, sometimes
a photo of a leaf lying in the road
the exact size and shape of sadness.
My brain drives the long way today
on the road that hugs the river.
She knows the curves like she knows her blood.
It’s the same liquid motion
like a promise or a haunting.
The red light by the liquor store,
the turn at the Baptist church—the third one
with the marquee that reads
Be gentle. There are feelings everywhere.
And after just enough nostalgia songs on the radio
she pulls into the driveway with the beehive mailbox
and the sweet olive trees perfuming the air
for the third time this fall. It’s finally cooling.
They’re finally together again. A hug at the doorway
and soon they’re laughing over soup
like they were never apart.
Stories pour out of them long past moonrise
until they remember
they’re sisters.
They can tell each other anything.
Autobiography
I wonder what my brain thinks of me.
I bet she’s thought up a bunch of metaphors
for being useless or empty. A body
is so good at being useless and empty.
I’m a rusting go cart at a shutdown carnival.
A bush that’s let go of all its berries.
I’m the dust of crunched leaves
in a dry swimming pool.
Or a dining car at midnight
with windows no one looks through.
I wonder what she tells herself
about how we work together,
what she makes of arms and skin,
if she’s thought about how it feels
to move toward and hold someone,
how what’s made in that moment
is a private science—a clumsy orbit
of love and need. There’s no heat in theories.
I can just hear her say that.
Brain knowledge is clean
and meticulous
and insular. It loves by computation.
I wonder what she does
when it’s Sunday and raining
and I haven’t woken up yet.
She’s got her own living room
with her own cats
and her own quiet,
her own worries and past
and longings. I like to think
that dreams are her way of holding,
that she sends stories into my sleep
instead of Valentines. This is the orbit we make.
Autobiography
My brain is a piano.
I like the fact of it,
all the keys to try, the plunking,
each new sound growing accumulations.
There’s the smoothness under my fingers,
the gliding, then the resistance, the pressure,
the weather of my thinking coming alive
in hammers and strings.
A thousand reckless decisions.
It’s meant as a closed system
but what if I opened the heavy box
to its highway of humming metal
and slipped things, like memory,
between the strings.
Picture it. This naked gratefulness of sound
with feathers and oak leaves
where the quiet should be. Curled bits
of fortune cookie paper: you’re only as strong
as your cooking and a home is what your heart makes
and remember the children, how they dance and see.
Like filling a funeral. Like the flowers on a death,
but something stays wild.
Like I’m saving everything.
Like I’m mapping a world.
Gratitude is a Joy and a Burden Like Wildflowers Gathered from the Yard, Both Fiercely Alive and Always About to Die
For a month when I was four I gave my mother
a handful of flowers a day.
Today I look up at the trees and their splashing light
and I learn something about where I’m headed,
about listening, about the shapes of my memories,
the blossoms they make, this continual germination.
What I want to say is thank you for blooming,
thank you to the sky for being the sky
but a bigness comes,
a happiness that’s too big,
so big it’s all these sudden leaves
rushing to give themselves to the ground.
Autobiography
My brain is a vegetable garden.
Radishes and pumpkins explode
from the warm darkness of the soil.
It’s the same heat where thoughts come from.
A hidden radiance, then a seed or a bulb,
then a meal and broth,
and the kitchen is another garden
where stories grow in the spaces between people.
Words send out vine after vine
until they take hold.
It’s a wonder we’re not covered in leaves.